


HOW STRAIT THE GATE: SEQUEL: ALTERNATE/AU VERSION

by ivorygates



Series: How Strait The Gate [5]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Dark, Doctor Darkside, M/M, Season/Series 08
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-05
Updated: 2013-08-05
Packaged: 2017-12-22 13:36:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/913809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivorygates/pseuds/ivorygates
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>If you don't like that ending, here's another one.  Courtesy of Sid, who really really REALLY wanted a fix-it...</p>
    </blockquote>





	HOW STRAIT THE GATE: SEQUEL: ALTERNATE/AU VERSION

**Author's Note:**

> If you don't like that ending, here's another one. Courtesy of Sid, who really really REALLY wanted a fix-it...

_'If people know you like that sort of thing, Daniel, they use it against you.'_

"You'd better come inside," Jack says, because Daniel, filled with the question, filled with the awful _potential_ of the question, is standing on the doorstep of Jack's Georgetown townhouse at three in the morning, in the rain. Daniel follows him inside, mute and tongue-tied now. It's the first time he's ever been to Jack's place in Washington. Jack has been gone a year, more, fifteen months. Fifteen months since Jack left, since Landry arrived, since Cameron Mitchell came to Stargate Command and Daniel murdered him, and now, in excoriating hindsight, Daniel thinks of all the things he could have done that weren't what he did. Mitchell was reckless and Mitchell was brash, and Daniel knew he wouldn't listen, but the affair _(their affair, their illicit forbidden **homosexual** affair)_ would have given him leverage. If he'd cared to use it. If he'd bothered to use it.

He looks around the living room. Tasteful designer-decorated, in a subtle militaristic flag-waving way. Years and miles and light-years from Jack's comfortable nest in Colorado Springs.

He accepts the towel when Jack returns with it. Stunned and bemused with his own thoughts, he hadn't noticed Jack leaving and returning. He towels his hair mutely, pulls off his coat and stares at it until Jack takes it from him. Jack is still in his bathrobe (dark blue and plush) and his bare shins look absurdly vulnerable. But Daniel (anthropologist and historian) has always known that clothing is armor. Is a mask. Is a defense. And he'd stripped Mitchell of all his defenses as recklessly, unthinkingly, as Mitchell had stripped him of his clothes, and _oh god, hadn't he learned the lesson about rushing in where angels fear?_

Apparently not.

"You come all this way just to ask that?" Jack asks.

Daniel sits down on the couch, slowly. Feeling numb, feeling stunned, and is it past disaster or future he's reacting to? He's supposed to be at his desk tomorrow, today, a few hours from now, and a part of him asks what he's doing here, and a part of him knows.

"Yeah," he says. "Yeah, I did."

Again Jack doesn't answer. He turns to the sideboard. There's a silver tray, crystal decanters, cut-crystal glasses that gleam like ice and stars. Jack pours two glasses half-full of amber liquid (Scotch), and brings them over. Daniel takes one (numbly) when Jack offers it. Drinks. Thinking of poison, escape. Thinking of a hotel room in Texas, and a gun, _(and the realization, too long delayed, that he would never have loved Mitchell but that he could have, ought to have, been kind to him, because Mitchell could have, would have, been a friend if Daniel had allowed him to be)_.

"I think you already know," Jack says quietly.

And Daniel does.

The pain -- denied, ignored -- comes welling up in his throat, his chest, strangling him, choking him, and he feels his eyes ache and heat and swell with tears. He drops his glass (forgetting he's holding it) to push his glasses up and press the heels of his hands against his eyes. His breath comes in a hitching sob, and all he feels is _panic._ The grief is worse than dying.

And he feels the couch shift, and Jack is sitting beside him. A careful hand on his shoulder, and at the touch Daniel turns toward him, gasping with self-knowledge, Ethon on the rock. Closet homophobia. It's not just for breakfast anymore. Jack puts his arms around him, and Daniel burrows into the touch (lifeline), and he's always defined his life in words, words, words and more words, and they come spilling out, even now, forced between the wet uneven breaths of grief.

 _Murderer. Innocent. Killer, destroyer, hater, hadn't hated it, strange, unwanted, not the man, just the wrong man, and killer, killer, **killer...**_

"Oh, Danny..." Jack sighs, and he hasn't called Daniel that in years. Hasn't been there to pet him, tease him, _hug_ him, and Daniel isn't sure when and why his life fell apart, and he realizes that from the moment Mitchell said to him: _General O'Neill said I could have any posting I wanted and I wanted to come here_ his fate was sealed, because the jealousy had risen up in Daniel, white and hot and ugly and clothed in the garments of expediency. The greatest good for the greatest number. Him or me. The mission, the mission is all important.

"Oh, god, Jack. What am I going to do?" he says at last.

"You live with it," Jack says. Sure and certain, voice of experience. "You learn from it."

"I don't want to know the things I know," Daniel says. Sitting back. Wiping his eyes (unafraid to weep in front of Jack, he's done it before). _I don't want you to hate me._

"That doesn't sound like the Dr. Daniel Jackson I know," Jack answers. Lightly. Retreating into faint mockery, self and otherwise, a thing he's always used (Daniel knows) to pretend he isn't talking about the important things. Or to not talk about them at all.

And Daniel doesn't want to talk. Or he does. Only he doesn't know what he wants to say. "Please," he says, reaching out. Taking Jack's hand, clutching at it desperately, as if he's fallen _(fallen into a pit of his own digging; the Pit; the Abyss)_ and only Jack can draw him out. "Please," he repeats, and gasps with relief when Jack's hand tightens on his.

"It's my fault, Daniel," Jack says. _(Yes. Okay. I hear you, Daniel hears)_ "I know you. I should have known him. I would have warned him," Jack says. Heavily. Deliberately.

And Daniel feels the weight of the words like the heavy impact of a scourge, like the pain of lancing an infected wound and allowing all the poison to drain away. "I should have known ... myself," he answers _(baring his back, baring his soul, bearing the pain)_.

Jack reaches up with his free hand, cupping Daniel's jaw. Daniel leans into the warmth of Jack's hand, his chest aching with relief at the care. "We are too soon old and too late smart," Jack answers gently.

"Is it too late?" Daniel blurts out. _Too late for us, and I don't even know what I want, but I want you..._

"Aren't you the one who told me it's never too late?" Jack answers, and he's speaking in code, in a hidden language of reference and symbol, but Daniel is a master of secret languages.

"I-- I'll--" Daniel says _(And he thinks of Russia, thinks of a future/past that never was, but still it haunts his dreams)_.

"Call the office," Jack says, finishing his sentence _(the way he so often did; re-editing Daniel's reality)_. "Tell them you won't be in today." He slips his hand out of Daniel's, picks up his glass from the floor. "Finish your drink," Jack orders.

And Daniel does.

#


End file.
